The Juan MacLean Leave The Musician's Underground Railroad Behind

06/26/09 12:12pm

by Phil Villeneuve (CHARTattack)

The Juan Maclean are on tour across North America in a big van.

John MacLean, the band's mastermind, had a few minutes to chat with CHARTattack about his futuristic influences, blurring the lines between fiction and reality, his Canadian roots and slightly illegal trips across our border.

CHARTattack: A lot of the press photos and album art for The Future Will Come are dark, sterile and futuristic, but the record itself is pretty warm and inviting. How did those concepts meet up?
John MacLean: I think that had more to do with the lyrical tone of the album.

I've also always had a futuristic feel to what I've done, so Nancy [Whang] and I actually compiled a mood board, which was a collection images. So, stills from movies, photos and compiled them to establish a mood or tone for the artwork and visuals.

What mainly came out it was stuff from Blade Runner, Logan's Run, THX-1138, which is the first George Lucas film and also 2001: A Space Odyssey. Those were the big ones and the themes that emerged were a lot of white, bleakness and seeming futuristic without the inclusion of things like spaceships or robots or something.

So with these pictures, is this a future you'd like to see? Or is this what you predict?
It's just simply cumulative influence of things that I grew up with and still seem to be in touch with. Everything from the authors Philip K. Dick to William Gibson to the movies that I mentioned to music that was made mainly in the '80s that was meant to sound futuristic — like Kraftwerk or Gary Numan. So you throw all those things together and you end up where I'm at.

Have you ever considered comedy? Your blog is pretty hilarious.
It's funny, a couple of years ago I was approached by an agent and then a publisher wanting to know if I was interested in compiling them somehow and publishing them. I kind of decided it needed to wait, so I had a lot more time to devote to it. But I think I always envisioned a sort of novel.

I was blown out of the water by the James Frey book, A Million Little Pieces. I always wanted to do a memoir that was half fiction, half non-fiction, blurring the lines between the two. But since then, people have inadvertently done that and gotten in trouble. I'll just wait 'til the dust settles a bit, because I love writing that stuff and people seem to react to it really well, sometimes more than the music.

And you often speak of Canada in your blog.
Yeah, "Canadia" I like to call it. I have a lifelong history with Canada. My father is Canadian. He grew up in Sydney, Nova Scotia and I've toured Canada so much in my music career and always have a good time there.

How did your parents meet?
I actually don't know. My father ran away from home when he was like 17 or something to Boston and who knows? I grew up in Boston, conceived at the drive-in apparently.

Speaking of Canada, they're letting you back in now after years of visa rejections, right?
Yeah, now they decided to let me in and I get proper visas and everything. I have no problem getting in now, but cross my fingers, you never know when they're gonna pull the plug on it.

I shouldn't say this, but we had to be a little creative with our entry into Canada for a while and we had to cancel shows at first because they just wouldn't let me in, but now everything's good.

It makes you wonder if there's like an underground railroad for artists to get into Canada sometimes.
I know! That's what it seems like. There should be, I guess.

Do you find when you're DJing and when you're performing as Juan the musician that you're a different person?
Oh, for sure! DJing is such a solitary exercise and a solitary life. You're travelling alone, you're DJing by yourself ... when we're in tour mode with the band, you're travelling in this little bubble of people, there's a lot more persona involved, you have to become something that's a little more larger than life and interesting to other people.

I think we're all very concerned with being entertaining. Especially attempting to play electronic music live, so much of the time it seems people just get up there with a lap top and stand there and it's very boring and we're all really concerned with the notion of putting on a really engaging live show that's really exciting.

I've read that one day you think the Juan MacLean will only write three minutes pop songs. Is that still true today?
I dunno. I say things like that and then I change my mind. Lately I think to myself, "No, I wanna write 'Happy House' over and over again 'cause that's my favourite song. I want to write 12 minute epic dance tracks." Honestly, I'll probably always split the difference.